Library of Congress: Chronicling America site

LC hopes to eventually have all historic American newspapers available online and searchable from their Chronicling America website.

To accomplish Washington’s grant, we are working in partnership with the University of Washington Libraries and other academic and public libraries around the state. The main goal of the grant is to make the newspaper pages full-text searchable using OCR technology. Another important goal is to generate a sustainable and collaborative model for newspaper digitization in Washington State that can continue and build around the state, past this initial grant.

2 Responses to “WSL Receives NEH Newspaper Digitization Grant”

This, in my opinion, is one of the most exciting projects in which the state library is involved. I’ve been using the Library of Congress site for about a year now in researching the Seattle world’s fair of 1909, and it’s really a radical improvement over the old way of searching through old papers. Imagine — instead of going through reels of microfilm, hunting for the one article that interests you and probably missing it because of eyestrain, you can type in a search term and instantly see all the newspaper pages that mention it. A search that would have taken months — and which would probably have never been done — now takes a few seconds. Until this LOC project went online, would I ever have thought to look for articles about a Seattle event in the Amador (Calif.) Ledger? Not on your life. And I didn’t have to make a special trip to the library to do it. So far the only fairly complete west-coast daily paper of note on the LOC site is the San Francisco Call, from 1890 to 1910. This at least provides us with specific dates of news events that took place in the Pacific Northwest, because it picked up a fair percentage of the AP west-coast wire. But once the Washington state papers go up — wow! One other fascinating thing about this project is that the image quality is far superior to the scans individual users can make from the microfilm scanning machines now in common use at libraries. Yeah, I might wish that back numbers of still-extant papers were included, though I realize that’s not within the parameters of the project. (I gather that the LOC was hoping still-existing newspapers might take on the work themselves, though that now seems a forlorn hope.) And I might wish that a few other interesting-and-defunct Washington papers were included in the first batch — the Seattle Daily News, the Seattle Union Record, and The Argus, for example. But the only real problem with the project is that the scanning isn’t already completed and the whole thing wasn’t posted online, like, yesterday. And I guess that if there’s a message I might provide to the folks at the state library — the Library of Congress site is slowly being discovered by word of mouth; there actually are a fair number of us already using it, and we’re looking forward to seeing it expand.

We plan on announcing more about the project as titles go online. As and FYI – we did put out a press release about our NDNP award last year but alas, no local or other newspapers picked it up. It’s a tough time for local news these days.